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Angelina Jolie’s choice of a double mastectomy to fend off breast cancer is stunningly brave.

Actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose for photographers as they arrive at the 69th annual Golden Globe Awards in January, 2012. Oscar-winning actress Jolie said on May 14, 2013 that she had undergone a preventive double mastectomy. (MARIO ANZUONI / REUTERS)

Angelina Jolie did all women a great kindness this week with her candour about her medical decision to have both of her breasts removed to avoid the cancer that was almost certainly lying in wait.

What? She did what? To her what?

That was the initial reaction of many people, me included. But gratitude and respect began flowing alongside the usual misogyny and one hopes that Jolie will be treated decently. Employed in an industry where sexuality earns Federal Reserve-scale payouts, she decided to tell her story of fending off a bad death, her biggest worry being explaining the surgery to her six children.

Jolie is dauntless. She has a lion heart.

We live in a world where women are like chickens, reduced to their parts. Men are still lucky enough to be considered whole, the only crucial bit lying upwards of the neck. Sadly for them, this is changing. Credit, or rather responsibility, goes to Men’s Health magazine.

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But women? We are a packet of behinds, thighs, hair and lips. I am only reciting current primary targets. There is nothing on a woman’s body that isn’t brutally assessed. The secondary targets with mandates are bellies (must be flat), eyebrows (emphatic), toe cleavage (wear low-cut shoes), arms (Michelle Obama-muscled) and genitals (plucked to a soundtrack of screaming).

Breasts, in a category all their own, have been reduced into even more parts, just as chicken breasts are made into breaded fingers for bar snacks. Nipples have long been excoriated for slipping out. Now it’s “side-boobs” and “under-boobs.” It isn’t just tabloids that pillory women for revealing below-standard side boobs, it’s the Huffington Post, run by a woman.

Into the fray steps Jolie, famous for gorgeousness, talent, wealth, maternity, a social conscience and a hungered-for actor-husband, exploding the neurosis with a hand grenade. Beauty means less to her than life itself, imagine that, possibly because she is used to her breasts and legs since they belong to her.

Sadly, she is a celebrity so her breasts (like her lips and one of her legs) are jointly owned with the public, almost like the airwaves, which may be partly why I am writing this.

Jolie will reconstruct her breasts, as she carefully explained in a plain-spoken New York Times op-ed. “The results can be beautiful.”

I have always thought, usually icily, that the great female disadvantage is that breasts — a secondary sexual characteristic like male facial hair — are visible even while covered and are thus easy to judge. This is not helpful to young girls. Everyone has a breast trauma story or two or several hundred.

One woman told me she “ignored” them as they grew. “I didn’t want anything to do with them. I wore an undershirt until age 15. I didn’t want to take on the responsibility of womanhood.”

Other women recall reciting lines from Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret, exercising to get out of their “baby bras.” “We must — we must — we must increase our bust,” they chanted. But why must we?

Imagine if we did this to boys. Oh right, they have circumcision trauma.

I, on the other hand, summoned up what courage I had — a teaspoonful — and asked my mother for a training bra. “What good would that do?” she said, shutting me down in a brisk Glaswegian way from which I have yet to recover.

Within six months the pair of Charlies had grown to Wagnerian proportions on my childish frame — they’d go one way and I’d go the other — yet to this day I hear my mother’s voice and buy boyish clothes that don’t fit me.

Breasts have been porned, and not in a good way, their appearance altered by online porn to such an extent that bras are padded now, not to increase size, but to hide visible nipples. That way, women look more like those figures loaded with busty substances in video games, like Jolie’s Lara Croft. Dolls don’t have nipples, women do, but you wouldn’t know it to look at us.

I just bought a Bali bra designed, I thought, for a grown woman, with wide shoulder straps with gel pads, oh never mind, it’s boring.

But they had hard patches in the centre of each cup, like those caps you put under bed legs to protect the rug. I kid you not, they were shaped like daisies. Imagine the corporate reasoning. “Women like florals. Nipples are bad. Let’s build a shame buffer.” Imagine the sweatshop seamstress who had to sew it in to suit what she assumed was some depraved Western preference.

Yes, it is indeed awkward when your nipples grow stiff in a headwind, especially when it’s just on one side. But nipple guards are designed for the pedophile demographic.

Go into a Victoria’s Secret and you are facing walls of stiff pink cups like some kind of disco wallpaper, or a deranged version of the padding they use to line service elevators. I’d call it a breast celebration if the men in the store weren’t so shifty looking. Will they ever find a woman to fill the gear they’re buying?

Speaking of shame, look at how nursing mothers are humiliated for hauling their vile dugs out in public to please an infant. Right, you weren’t staring.

This has been a nice discussion of breasts, has it not, a mere sample from an onslaught of faux Jolie concern over the coming weeks. Breasts are beautiful. I entirely understand what people see in them. Sexual desire has my stamp of approval.

But the Jolie story sits astride a canyon, sexual arousal on one side, medical care on the other, while in the crevasse sits every bit of personal human weirdness. I wish good things for Jolie, only good things, but she’s in for a rougher ride than even Lara Croft could handle.

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